Mein Stern

We were together a few days ago. The ordinary Tuesday. Now she is at the sea with her mother. The second home, where she should be in early summer.

This morning my thoughts ran downhill — I wrote about that already. This afternoon, in the quiet the visit left behind, I want to set down the thing that holds still while the rest of it slides: what I saw in her in the first hour, and have carried eleven years without ever writing down.

April 4, 2015. Easter. She was born on the morning of the first full moon after the equinox, the Paschal full moon — the same logic that moves the feast each year and does not move her birthday. April 4 holds.

In the first hours I held her. Her mother was with the doctors. For a while it was only the two of us, in the kind of room a hospital keeps for that.

I said one thing. Mein Stern. My star. Not a name a father reaches for. Something observed. She had come a long way, and some of where she came from was still on her.

What I did not think of, holding her, is that the name we had already chosen carried the same thing. A star in the middle of it. A light at the end. We had not planned that. We chose what sounded like her — and found we had written down, months early, the thing I would say aloud in the first hour.

I will not write much about what I have watched since. It is hers, not mine to spend.

Only this: she has always seen more than what was in the room. She asks the question that sits under the question. She moves by an inner reading that was there before anyone taught it to her. That is not a thing to be corrected. It is the most herself she ever is.

She showed me in the first hour, and in the years that came and went. I understood what I saw in her, and I stood beside it — beside her — to support her gifts and not negate them.

I stayed where I could keep seeing her. Present when it was possible.

What I owe her, as her father, is not advice, and not even protection. It is steadiness. To stay recognisably myself. To not talk myself out of what I saw. To be findable.

Last Tuesday — the ordinary Tuesday, the day before she left with her mother for the Baltic Sea — at the beach she said: papa, you go there, and I go there to meet my friend. She went. I was somewhere else on the same beach. Every so often she came — for water, for an apple, or just to know her papa was there. When her friend went home, she came back. We lay on the beach together.

Day 65 — Phase 9 — Hearing — Pericardium — Amethyst — Psalm 46 + Gospel of John
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan | CC BY-SA 4.0
stewardship@ubec.network